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Designing the user experience - a user centred focus

Authors: (Fleming, 1998a)

Abstract: This book establishes a framework for designing and planning the navigation and structure of a website. The research here primarily looks at the sections on user centred design, site architecture and interface and interaction design.

People perceive the web as a space (p1). And for most, navigation is about moving through that space to a final destination or goal. It is a means to and end - it is not the end in itself. We should therefore focus on the user experience.

Basic navigation needs to answer the following questions: Where am I? Where can I go? How will I get there? How can I get back to where I once was? (p5)

You need to know where you are - there is little sense of 'you are here' on the web. This contrasts with survey results by Pitkow and Kehoe that suggest orientation is not a big issue for the majority of web users, and comments by Tognazzini that orientation is not as important.

Lumping client goals with user goals is a serious blunder - since they are often very different things (p7). Site designers should create avenues designed to help users meet their goals. Without this focus, there are many obstacles.Understand user goals by creating profiles and thinking in scenarios. Rather than designing sidebars and menues, you're designing space and interactions (p11).

Navigation should be easily learned. People who spend $500 on software will take the time to learn it, but not a free web site (p14). Make it easy to learn, and transparent and obvious. This concept supports Norman's belief that learning should be minimised when the goal of the user is to accomplish a task.It also attaches itself to the idea of consistency - that existing knowledge can be used in the place of learning if the tools used in a navigation framework are consistent with those learned earlier. This consistency may be literal (for example the word 'Home' signifying a link to the home page), through metaphor (a magnifying glass representing search) or through standards (a column of blue underlined words in a left-hand panel representing link options). Combining these forms would suggest a corresponding increase in consistency and simplification of the learning process.

Feedback is the only way users can tell whether they have been successful in performing a task. Create navigation and controls that are responsive (p17).

Navigation should appear in context - understand where people will want to go when they've finished doing something (p18). This understand of motivations, and of the likely reactions a user may have to a set of tasks and feedback, is key theme in Fleming's writing. She refers to the GVU biennial survey in October 1997 where of 10,000 survey respondents asked to select "the most critical issue facing the Internet", navigation was ranked third behind privacy and censorship. Europeans and respondents over 50yo ranked navigation on par with censorship (p31). Experience level had little effect on the result.

Flemming suggests understanding goals firstly means understanding your audience, and that means understanding target markets and profiles, and how those different profiles might behave. She uses an example of two distinctly different users in an online dating agency. One, a male in his early 40s, is concerned about privacy, is interested in finding someone who shares his religion and has a slow computer. The other, a 21-year-old female student, is using the agency for a bit of fun, worried about wierdos and has a high speed university connection. The two are used as examples of completely different goals and expectations from the same service.